UK’s Withdrawal from the EU
Debate between Yvette Cooper and David T C Davies(5 years, 10 months ago)
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David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
The right hon. Lady might recall that in November, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee warned that Brexit could actually cause a huge amount of cheap food imports to flood into the UK. Which particular scare story does she side with: the one that says there will be cheap food imports or the one that says that we are going to run out of fruit and veg?
Yvette Cooper
We should take very seriously the warnings about a reduction of up to 80% in the volume of goods passing through the border and the preparations that Border Force is making for that, as well as the warnings from major supermarkets including Lidl, Asda and Tesco about the potential restrictions on the food that they will be able to get into the shops and the warnings from the Environment Secretary—a strong leave campaigner himself—about tariffs on beef and lamb.
Finance (No. 3) Bill
Debate between Yvette Cooper and David T C DaviesTuesday 8th January 2019
(5 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Finance Act 2019 View all Finance Act 2019 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 8 January 2019 - (8 Jan 2019)
Immigration Bill
Debate between Yvette Cooper and David T C Davies(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
Hopefully the hon. Gentleman will apologise on behalf of the Home Secretary for pushing those divisive ad vans.
Mr Speaker
Order. I think that there is an identity crisis that needs to be resolved. I think that the right hon. Lady was pointing in the direction of the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson).
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point. It should disturb us all that an appalling two thirds of children who are rescued from slavery and trafficking go missing again and often become victims of the same traffickers or other groups. We need far stronger action on that; we owe it to those children who have been rescued, often from appalling conditions. We should not let them simply disappear again.
David T. C. Davies
Does the right hon. Lady recognise that one reason for that is that care workers in children’s homes are not allowed physically to restrain and prevent children from walking out? That is a result of the Human Rights Act, which was passed by her colleagues, along with the failure to deal with immigration that has led the Government to bring forward these urgent proposals today.
Yvette Cooper
If I had known the hon. Gentleman was going to raise such nonsense, I would not have let him intervene in the first place.
Let me move on to some of the remaining elements of the Bill. People who come to Britain and then abuse British law should not expect to stay here, and Labour has previously supported action to ensure that article 8 of the European convention on human rights is properly interpreted in cases involving foreign criminals. We also believe that appeals should be speeded up—serious cases that go to Strasbourg certainly take far too long.
The measures in the Bill do not deal with those issues, however, and instead it appears that the Government want to abolish appeals for whole categories of immigration cases because they cannot cope with the fact that they get so many decisions wrong in the first place. There are genuine and serious concerns about that approach because it turned out that the Government got it wrong in 50% of entry clearance cases that went to appeal. In managed migration cases that went to appeal, they got it wrong in 49% of decisions. In the majority of those cases the problem was Home Office error, so why not just put a bit of effort into getting the decision right in the first place? If those appeal rights are removed, many cases will cite human rights grounds to get an appeal and more cases will go to judicial review. The Government’s own impact assessment shows that that could cost £100 million, halving any savings the Home Secretary might hope to make.
The real gap in the Bill is that is says nothing about the exploitation of immigration in the workplace. There is nothing to deal with employers who take on illegal migrant workers or to tackle the exploitation of legal migration by the undercutting of wages and conditions in the local labour market. There is nothing to deal with the lack of enforcement of the minimum wage, or employers who use loopholes in the minimum wage to overcharge workers for overcrowded accommodation and offset that against their pay. There is nothing to deal with agencies that recruit only from overseas and exclude local workers from their books, or employers who recruit for some shifts only from certain nationalities.
All those practices are bad for everyone—they are bad for migrant workers who are exploited, bad for local workers who are undercut, bad for other businesses that are undermined and bad for our economy, which continues to depend on low-skilled migration being exploited in that way. The Government are doing nothing. The Labour party will set out amendments to give councils powers of enforcement on the minimum wage, close loopholes and tackle irresponsible agencies, and I hope the Government will support those measures.
The Bill does not do what the Government claim it does. Some of the measures are sensible, some are confused, and some are of serious concern. They claim it tackles illegal immigration, but it does nothing of the sort. It fails to do enough to tackle the serious problems. The Opposition will not oppose the Bill as we believe it should go to Committee so we can amend and reform it, use the opportunity to introduce better and fairer controls to deal with the Government’s failures, and make immigration work for all.
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Debate between Yvette Cooper and David T C Davies(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right that this is the next step on a journey, and it is the right one. We should not resist the values of the majority of people across the country who now support same-sex marriage.
Yvette Cooper
We have discriminated for too long. Until the 1960s people were locked up or punished for loving someone of the same sex. Gay men were told by the Home Secretary even in the 1950s that they were a “plague” on this country. Lesbian women were forced to hide their relationships, and teenagers were bullied at school, with no protection. Until the early 1990s teachers were unable to tell the child of a same-sex couple that their family was okay, for fear that that would breach section 28. So much has changed, and in a short time, too.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. As a society we should feel deeply ashamed of what happened to Alan Turing, who was a hero of this country.